Sinister Entity (37 page)

Eddie.
 

“How the hell are you doing this?” she said aloud, not sure if he could hear her or read her mind.
 

There would be time to ask him later. Right now, the message had been received. She resumed her recon of Scott Street, searching for a split level house with blue shingles, some of them hanging off. The neighborhood was filled with split level homes of varying colors. She had spotted a couple of blue ones, but in each case, the shingles were in place.
 

She turned around at the cul-de-sac and sped down the street, confident that the road would be clear of pedestrians in the dead of night. At the corner, she made a hard right onto Hall Place and slowed down, swiveling from left to right, searching.
 

Jessica felt time slipping away as easily as a silk blanket between her fingers. Selena was under Eddie’s protection, but even he admitted he had no real experience doing anything like this. And he looked physically exhausted. How much more could he take?

“Where are you, you sick bastard?” she muttered, leaning close to the steering wheel and peering at the darkened houses.
 

The farther she got from the Leighs’ block, the smaller and more run down the houses became. It wasn’t exactly poor, but definitely on the lower middle-class end. Most of the front lawns were well-tended, but a few looked as if they could use an industrial weed whacker.

At the end of Hall, she could only make a left and found herself on a very small street that ended at another cul-de-sac. There were seven houses in total—three on each side and one at the very end. Two were small Capes, one a ranch in need of a paint job.
 

Her heart stammered for a beat and her mouth went dry when she first heard, then saw a pair of dark blue shingles on the last house on the right slap against the upper corner of the house as a salty gust of wind swept through the street.

It was also the lone house with an attached garage.
 

She pulled the Jeep right up to the garage door. It was cracked and flecked with peeling bits of paint. The passing wind left utter silence in its wake. The house looked cold and empty, as did most houses in the night, but this one even
felt
abandoned.
 

So as not to make any noise, she left her door ajar and pressed her face against one of the square windows in the garage door. The glass was too filthy to see through. She pulled out a penlight and shined it inside. Its light was just strong enough for her to make out the shape of a car, and a large one at that, but she couldn’t tell the make or color.
 

She moved to the next window, which was grimier than the first, then the next, skipping past the two that had been filled with plywood.
 

“Dammit.”

Even though the house looked exactly as Eddie had described it, a part of her needed the additional proof of the car before crossing the line into criminal breaking and entering. Eddie had proved to be the real deal, but no one was infallible.
 

She went back to the car and opened the hatch, finding a screwdriver in the toolkit she kept in the spare tire wheel well. Looking around to make sure no lights had snapped on in the nearby houses, she went to work, digging the flat end of the screwdriver into a corner where the plywood met the window frame. Softly grunting, she wiggled it back and forth, trying to loosen the wood. There was a crack, then a fibrous tearing as the plywood began to give way.
 

It popped out and landed inside the garage. Jessica froze, sure that the muffled noise could be heard for miles. After waiting for a ten count and seeing that no one had come to find the source of the sudden noise, she clicked on the penlight and poked her head inside.
 

The red Thunderbird filled most of the cramped garage. The windows were heavily tinted and she could see through the clear windshield that the leather interior was jet black. A perfect stalker car.
 

“Got you, asshole.”

A battered metal door, partway open, led to the interior of the house.
 

She pocketed her penlight and screwdriver. Reaching her arm through the window, she searched for the door lock, holding the end outside with her other hand. When she found the latch and turned, she eased it open so it didn’t make a sound. Lifting the door, inch by agonizing inch, seemed to take forever. Someone must have been watching over her, because despite most of the house appearing to be in need of repair, the springs on the door were well oiled and silent.
 

The garage smelled like old motor oil and grease. All of the tools, and there were tons of them, were carefully hung on pegs or put in marked storage bins. The man who had lived here had made his car his priority.
 

The metal door opened up into the kitchen, and another smell overwhelmed her like a punch to the nose. Images of rotted road kill on the side of the highway flooded her brain, only this was worse as it was mingled with the scent of shit and the putrescence of festering garbage.
 

Something had died in there. Or better yet, some
one
.
 

Jessica pulled her shirt up over her nose.
 

“Dad, I know you’ve been with me the whole time here. Your squeakpip could use a little extra courage right about now. I’m used to seeing things after they’ve left a body, not the body itself.”

Stepping into the kitchen was like entering a walk-in freezer. The temperature outside was in the upper seventies, but none of the warmth of the day had permeated this house for a long time. She winced in disgust as a pair of cockroaches skittered past her foot, in hasty retreat from the full garbage pail.
 

The floor above her creaked as if someone was unsuccessfully trying to sneak about. Cautiously, she left the kitchen and walked into the living room. It was bare, with just a reclining easy chair, tube TV on a press-wood stand and small tables on each side of the chair. A pair of binoculars rested atop one table while the other held a stack of newspapers and the remote for the TV.
 

A deep, masculine groan, dripping with reproach, a warning to her that contained a promise of dire intentions, echoed down the nearby stairs.
 

She looked up the dark staircase, unable to see anything above, though the smell was even more pungent, a breadcrumb on the trail for her to follow if she dared. A near painful tingling started at the nape of her neck and she had to rub it to make it subside while still holding her shirt up to her nose. She hated when her body’s natural reactions tried to hijack will.
 

“I know you don’t want me here,” she called up the stairs. “But we both know it’s too late for that. Time to find out who you really are.”

She was alone, in a strange home that housed an evil EB and a dead body. There was finally a direction to take. She knew what she was up against. For the first time since she’d come to New Hampshire, she felt she was in her element.
 

With the tiny beam from her penlight leading the way, Jessica ascended the stairs.
 

Eddie rocked back when he felt the EB slam into the protective cocoon of light he had constructed around them. Selena and Ricky tugged on his hands to keep him from rolling out of their circle.
 

“Is something wrong?” Rita asked. He could see her squeeze her daughter’s hand a little bit harder, as if to let her know that she would not let any harm come to her.
 

“Just our friend trying to get in. It didn’t work,” Eddie said. He closed his eyes again and concentrated on keeping the EB out. He laughed to himself when a thought floated past for just an instant.
I feel like a spam blocker.
 

Since he’d never done this before, he wasn’t sure how long he could maintain it or how much he could withstand. It was his hope that when Jessica found the body, the EB would have to divide its energy, leaving it too weak to get past his novice psychic wall.
 

Hope was all he and Jessica were going on now.
 

He could hear Greg and Rita talking to the kids, though it was as if they were several rooms away, behind closed doors.
 

Greg shouted, “Kids, I need you to stay calm!”

Eddie opened his eyes and saw that all of the candles had been snuffed out. The rising panic in the room was almost tactile.
 

He said, “Your father’s right. It can’t get at you, so it’s directing itself at little things it can control. It wants you to be scared, to break the circle, to be vulnerable. Don’t let it inside your head. It’s going to try to get your attention in other ways. Just ignore it. If you want, close your eyes and think of your favorite place to be. If you’re not paying attention, then nothing it does can affect you.”

It was easier said than done, but he needed to reassure them all that the EB was impotent, for now.
 

A lamp scraped across an end table, tottered and crashed to the floor. Everyone but Eddie jumped. “See, candles and lamps,” he said. “That’s all it can do now.”

“Mom, I want to get out of here,” Selena said.
 

“I know, honey, I know. Don’t let go of my hand. I’m here.”

There was a rattling of glasses in the kitchen cabinets, followed by another futile attempt at getting through to Selena. Her fear was riling the EB up, but there was nothing Eddie could do about it. He just had to hold steady.
 

And hope that Jessica had found the house.
 

Chapter Fifty-One

The old stairs creaked like an ocean-battered pirate ship. The smell of decay was so strong it pierced the cloth of her shirt that was pulled over the lower half of her face, clogging her nose until it felt as if it were fouling her brain, settling in so it could blossom into a dark, malignant tumor.
 

Jessica had to fight back the urge to puke. She gagged twice, but managed to keep everything down. The second floor was small, with only two rooms and a bathroom. As much as the thought repulsed her, she had to follow her nose to the source.
 

The first bedroom was an obvious junk room, filled from floor to ceiling with boxes, card tables, discarded chairs and mounds of magazines and other junk.
 

A hoarder’s paradise.
 

It was an odd sight, considering the neat garage and Spartan living room. She got the feeling that the man who had lived here wasn’t even sure
what
he was—an obsessive neat freak or a cluttered pack rat?

As an EB, he was focused and repugnant. It was as if death had granted him clarity of his tortured, confused soul. She had to remind herself that not everyone wanted to go to the light. Bad people made for bad EBs.
 

Up next was the bathroom. She pictured a tub full of blood and water, a bloated body within the vile soup, one arm dangling over the side, a straight razor still in its grasp.
 

She exhaled when she saw it was empty.

There was one room left, and the stench was definitely strongest at the threshold.
 

She paused before stepping into the room. A high-pitched humming noise came from deep inside. The shades had been pulled down, so no light permeated the darkness. Her hand flew to her covered mouth when her penlight settled on the dark shape sitting with its back to her on a plush chair by the closed window.
 

The humming was the buzzing of thousands of flies. They swarmed over the body, making it look as if its flesh were alive and crawling off its bones. She couldn’t see anything beyond the writhing black bodies of the flies.
 

She dry heaved, dropping her penlight. Her shirt pulled away from her face. When she sucked in a great lungful of air, several flies darted down her throat. Coughing to spit them out, she reeled into the wall. She knew it was just her mind playing tricks on her, but she swore she could feel them wriggling around in her lungs, their tiny wings scraping against the soft tissue.
 

The flies streamed from the dead man in a dark mass, covering her in mere seconds from head to foot. Jessica swatted at her arms, her hair and face, used her fingers to scoop them out of her mouth. The thought of being enshrouded by flies that had, only seconds ago, been feasting on the rotted flesh of a corpse broke her will, and she screamed as she stumbled out of the room, tripping on the pulled-up edge of an area rug and landing on her stomach. She heard the crunch of a hundred fly bodies, felt their pulp and blood splash against her skin.
 

Laughter exuded from the room as wave upon wave of flies descended on her, seeking her blood, driving her to madness.
 

“Shit,” Eddie muttered.
 

He’d felt the EB leave the house, which could only mean Jessica had found the body and it was not falling for his divide-and-conquer plan. His sole consolation was that she had done this before, was, in fact, much more experienced than him. And if she was at the source, she would find what she needed to end the nightmare.